A/N: I've always wondered why there are so few Immortal POV fics--there are only two I know of ("Of Magic and Bathtubs" by Rainstorm Amaya Arianrhod and "The Beauty with the Beast" by Merrybeans). Both are excellent, but I thought I'd try to expand the genre a little.
Edit: Discovered two more awesome Stormwing-centric fics: "I could be the feather in your cap" and "Preen" by Gavin Gunhold.
Various conversations in the Ficship forums (www. fanfiction .net/forum/The_Ficship_Competitions/54838/) really brought this fic into being. It is a fun place--go check it out.
Barzha looked over her flock as they contentedly glutted themselves on the living terror of the few survivors and bodies of the dead. One of the youngsters was trying to clumsily pry off a limb from a carcass as others watched and laughed.
The Stormwing queen smiled at his antics indulgently as she sat back and tried to pick the gristle out from between her teeth with her tongue, but it was lodged just near the gum and there was no helping it she knew. Well, it was a small irritation to have to bear after such a filling meal. With each bite, she had tasted the dead man's life, eaten his memory, drank in his dreams. The tangy metallic taste of the liver lingered on her tongue even as she relieved herself over the corpse now that she'd eaten her fill.
The fear-filled empty gaze of the befouled corpse stared into the sun.
That night, she knew, she would dream the dead man's days, live his joys and sorrows. Having devoured his flesh, she would live a mortal, a human for a night in her dreams. Flesh-eating was an acquired taste really—it took the fledglings a couple of centuries before they understood the attraction of it.
The fear her kind needed to abate their hunger, but the memories devoured through the flesh, those were for a pleasure she could not put words to. From what Hebakh told her, it was something akin to the pleasure humans took in poetry.
Barzha felt the air move and looked up to find Jokhun winging down beside her, his talons tearing a dead human child's limbs as he settled. "Satisfied with this pitiful skirmish, my queen Razorwing?"
Barzha's eyes, as dark as the iron crown on her head, flared with anger. "Are you asking for a duel, Jokhun Foulreek?"
"No, no, of course not." Jokhun batted his wings in denial. "It is the younger ones, you know, stirring up trouble. Saying that you and your consort are too weak to make humans fear us as they should."
Barzha narrowed her eyes in disgust at his blatant posturing. At last she spit, her yellowish saliva landing near his talon, to let Jokhun know just what she thought of his tactics. There was not much else she could do about the conniving idiot unless he challenged her directly. But he was too much a worm to do so and knew she had too much honor to attack him without provocation. But perhaps she worried for naught. Surely, the rest of the flock would never be foolish enough to fall for his ridiculous plots. Her contentment in the meal was soured in any case.
She spread her wings to take off. The rest joined her belatedly.
As Barzha drank in the fear of the Banjiku slaves prostrated before her cage, she refused to let herself dwell on how far she had fallen. When the slaves raised up their heads at last, clearing away the sickly sweet incense and flowers they had brought as offerings, she deliberately released her bowels, letting fall a chain of feces. The humans recoiled back in revulsion and the tinge of disgust that colored their terror now added a sweeter flavor to it.
She heard Hebakh bating on a perch behind her, and the vision of his razorsharp wings spreading out, the feathers shrieking against each other, made their fear spike further.
This sweet wine, she had missed for so long. Four centuries' worth of hunger. The humans scurried away like insects, leaving the pleasant, spicy fragrance of their panic behind them.
A queen of the Stone Tree nation reduced to this. But Stormwings had always lived off the leavings of humans. No, it was the indignity of the cage, the betrayal of her own clan that drove her to the edge of madness.
When she got her talons on that motherless worm Johkun, she would tear out each feather from his wings before she killed him and as for that Emperor Mage, she would savor the little maggot's liver and shred his heart even as it beat. He would die slowly and painfully and she would sear the memory of his death into human minds. The little mortal dungbeetle thought he could cage her, put her on display like some animal in his collection? She would make him feel the wrath of Stormwing.
"Ease, dear heart."
She turned to find Hebakh's pale, intense eyes on her. He was a two centuries or so younger than her, but the strongest vates the Stone Tree had ever known. She had been their queen, but he, he had been their vates. That the wretched cockroaches who dared to masquerade as Stormwings would turn on him!
Had they forgotten all Stormwing lore in the headiness of returning to the mortal realms? It was the vates who carried the souls of the tribe, who bore the memories of their ancestors. To think that her tribe had betrayed their own heritage like a nest of serpents devouring their dam!
"Shall I share a memory with you, love?" He settled on the perch beside her and Barzha saw the red-gold glow of magic shimmering on his wings, he fluttered them and the threads of magic drifted upward weaving into a delicate fabric above her which fell like a veil over her eyes as his light-filled eyes glowed with memories not his own. "From the First Ancestor."
And Barzha felt her consciousness slip away and into another's much as it did in flesh-eating dreams...
At first she thought she had lost her way, for she was sure the village she had stopped at on her way up north during the spring thaws should be around here some where. But then she had found the village and wished she had lost her way after all.
The thatch had burned away on nearly all the buildings, and only a wall here and there remained to suggest the shape of human habitation. That and the charred, rotting bodies. It must have been months ago, from the look of the corpses, the skin dried like leather, the eyes picked out by birds and the bodies housing worms.
But the forest was working to reclaim everything, folding the poor battered village into its embrace, and soon all the pain, the death, and the memory of those who had lived here would be erased in its green embrace. Saplings were sprouting through lintels and vines creeping over the dead, as if to cradle their ravaged bodies.
Standing by a hollowed out house, she wondered if it had belonged to the farmer who had given her a night's lodging for his share of song. She fingered the arrow shafts buried in the singed wooden frame and refused to look in the eyesockets of the corpse that grinned at her from within. Maggots writhed just under the skin, creating the grotesque parody of a beating heart and breathing chest.
They had built a large bonfire in the heart of the village and all had clustered around as she had sung all the popular songs from the port cities for half the night, sea shanties and battle songs and court madrigals she remembered. She'd asked them for the local ones so she could add to her collection. A youth had produced a ballad she had never heard before and an old woman a lullaby that sounded as ancient as the earth.
The youths had all listened with eager eyes as she sung the war sagas, the glory of battle, the beauty of the sword. A few had bragged of their plans to join the militias in the city and she wondered now if she herself had helped sow the seeds of village's destruction. Every town she had walked through that autumn, it seemed, was ravaged and half-decimated by war, the crops rotting in the fields because there was no one left to harvest them.
She had tried to give a decent burial to the bodies, but there had been too many. She had only dug half a dozen graves by the time the sun set. In end, she had given up, making camp for the night at the edge of the village, trying to forget the corpses.
But she had dreamed of them that night, the broken, decayed bodies getting up to perform a grotesque dance as they listen to her play her harp and sing of the glory of war. She woke up gasping in fear and terror. She wished, then, that her nightmare would take shape and show others the true face of war.
That night a flock of metal-winged creatures descended on the ruined village. She was the first human they killed, her memory immortalized through her flesh as they devoured it.
Barzha felt herself released into her own mind as the vates working came to an end. Hebakh still sat back, grey eyes half-lidded as he concentrated on the magic. When the red-gold veil at last shimmered into nothing, she asked "Why show me this now?"
He smiled at her, a cold, cruel smile that showed his pointed, blood-encrusted teeth. "The Emperor Mage's time will come, my queen, my heart. Humans never know what they ask for."